And there she was.

Red.
The traffic signal turned me down.
A new track on the CD. A keyboard overture, slowly building up. Head swaying in tune with the melody, in anticipation of the amplified ecstasy soon to follow. Then came the trough, the fleeting silence just before the chorus broke out.

And there she was.

Like a belligerent piece of graffiti that stands out on a crowded ruin, like a splash of icy water in the middle of a cold winter night, like a distant fisherman's boat that punctuates a lonely sea's orange horizon, like a stolen moment of blissful somnolence during a busy day's work, there she was.

Percussion on the stereo.

My monday morning, on a platter.

The world emptied itself around me.
A fragrant deluge of headiness surged through my memory, burning itself onto it. Everything else hushed itself, slinking away quietly from the scene, into pixelated vision. Everything except the eyes. The eyes. Her eyes.

Those eyes. Two poetic specks of life reaching out across the abyss that was the urban wilderness surrounding me. Like crystal orbs to be gazed into, of course for more pragmatic purposes than to predict a future that had never seemed more obscenely irrelevant. I wasn't tied down to reality anymore, not to anything. I was no longer in the cockpit of a car languishing at a traffic crossing, I was somewhere else, somewhere very far away, trapped in her gaze while a distant stereo peppered my senses with a soaring chorus. I had just lived a forever.

There she was.
My monday morning reprieve, my raging memory, my...

I looked around myself, half expecting to hear the screeching sounds of my life grinding to an abrupt halt, curious to see if the sky would morph into a more heavenly shade of sky-blue as promised by the powers that be, wishfully hoping to see these words of mine take a colourful life of their own and waft across...

Until a rogue horn broke my senses.

And there she was.
Plastered across a billboard, selling me jeans.

Whisper

As my world wraps itself around me like a gigantic serpent strangling its prey in an impending sense of ravenousness, my thoughts wander to you, seeking you out in the wilderness that is memory. I think of you, I wonder where you might be, where your world might be, whether I would have mattered.

Limited to a life that is a conversation between a presence and its absence, I conjure up words you could say to me, and line up replies in my head, if only you could listen. There is so much that deserves to be said, so much to be given life to, so much that could have been, instead I'm left to smile into a darkness and hope it curves its lips in return.

Powerless against the deadening hush of certainty, I ripple in the moment, and dissolve in your absence. The darkness that is you, that is all that is not me, embraces me and carts me away into its essence, to its roots, to its raging sun, to you. My presence and your absence, at last. Consumed by a nothingness that is neither of us, I lean in towards you and let my blurry thoughts culminate in a momentous something, three words that barely escape my lips as the cruel heavens plunder them into an indiscernible whisper. I miss you.

You

You.

You are my silent lullaby. My blood red sun. My traveller's tale. My fading reason. My unfound excuse. My broken string. My guilty promise. My unfinished lesson. My empty yesterday. My bursting heart.

You are my unwritten epitaph. My deep blue sea. My soaring guitar riff. My reluctant wait. My cornered melancholy. My drawn out apology. My custom-made world. My furtive fall. My anguished symphony. My blank photograph.

You are my whiff of insanity. My moonless sky. My endless goodbye. My eloquent absence. My deceptive resilience. My forlorn smokescreen. My dawning realisation. My sore compromise. My angry wish. My cold winter night.

You are my secret childhood. My daily vertigo. My stolen kiss. My half-full glass. My hasty retreat. My white noise. My tiresome game. My unflinching arrogance. My dreamy reality. My poetic injustice.

You are my bleary eyed surprise. My wordless song. My early morning drive. My persistent religion. My unanswered call. My aching redemption. My unwanted freedom. My windy window. My lazy sunday. My searching inexistence.

You. My raging insolence. My charming ignorance. My lonely memory. My exquisite torment. My awkward adventure.

You. My seductive uncertainty. My ailing innocence. My relentless curiosity. My seething rain. My fleeting erasure.

You.
You. You. You.

Blitiri

The sound of something falling into place.
Click.

Cymbals inside my head.
Poetry. Break into a sweat.
Smile. The spoken word.
The sky opens up.
Repetition. Repetition.

Buzz. Splash. Beep. Zip. Ping.
Woof. Woof.
Clifford still talks to me. That big red dog. From 1992. [Or was it 1993?]
Onomatopoeia.
How do you forget that word? 16 years [Or is it 15?], I've tried and never failed to fail. Yes, that last phrase isn't mine. It's Kurt's. But does it mean I've stolen it, plagiarised it, in the parlance of the times? I don't know but I'm sure he wouldn't mind. And so neither shall I.

Why are you reading this?
I've always wanted to ask this question, bang in the middle of every one of my serious pieces. I never got around to being so stupid. I tell you, my head is heavy. "With what?!", I can hear many voices exclaim with disdain. **These words between the asterisks are meant to convey that I was silent in response to the question.** I didn't have a witty retort. Maybe Woody Allen might have had one. I'm sorry not to be him. But then, I shake myself violently and ask again, is it really so? Reconsidering it, I don't think I'm sorry not to be him. If I was, it would mean I'd have to be sorry for not being a lot of other things in life that are more important to me than being Woody Allen. I don't think I'm ready for such a drastic restructuring of my life's basic principles and values at this point. [You know how hard it is to get them in the first place. But that's not what I'm going to say.] I'll clear my throat, make a serious face, look into your eyes and say this - "You see, there's only so much a man can be. And being sorry for not being Woody Allen is not one of them."

That is one of the fastest things I've ever written in anything even remotely related to my blog and I have a feeling I'm not done yet. I'm compelled not to look to my left, because it's where my bookshelf is and I'm afraid a peek into the heavy names printed on those curvy spines might bring me back to my senses and break the flow of thought I'm so sure is perfectly in tune with my rapid churning out of words in the ether in front of me. Was that a meaningful sentence? I am getting so good at typing out without breaks, would you believe me if I said I didn't use the 'backspace' key at all during the course of writing this entire entry? Alright, you won't. Especially if you know me well. But it's true. I didn't use it at all. I used 'delete' to correct my typos only so I could finally write this line and end this on a grand note but the effect's all spoilt now. I have to find another grand way of ending this. So you can end reading it on a high and feel that I've written a very good piece and maybe even like me for writing it. Oh, the travesty that writing has become these days. But I assure you I'm not one of those vain, self-possessed, narcissistic writers. I swear. On myself.

I suddenly feel like standing up and delivering one of Alan Shore's wonderfully constructed, wonderfully expressive, wonderfully informative, wonderfully emotional and wonderfully soporific closing arguments. But I'm not Alan Shore. Ohkay, we've already been through this.

Enough for now. You can leave after reading a story. One of my own (wonderful) concoctions. No, no, not a concoction, it's a true story I've been part of. I've always loved how branding a story a true one suddenly makes it all the more interesting and believable. So, yes, it is a true story, a very true one.

I met god once.
He said to me, “Son, there’s something I’ve always wanted to ask you. For a long time now, I’ve seen you in pain, waiting for help. Why didn’t you ever try to talk to me? Are you dumb?”

I said, “Maybe, yes... But god, I too have something I’ve always wanted to ask you. Hasn't it ever occurred to you that you might be deaf?”

We've been on very good terms ever since.